


Not Against My Will

by Shinybug



Series: The Panic Room [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood, Dark, F/M, Kissing, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:02:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Until that moment, Hermione had not understood what blind trust truly was, or that she had placed it unthinkingly in his long-fingered, bloodied hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Against My Will

**Author's Note:**

> Part Two of The Panic Room series. Sequel to Already Dead, set vaguely near the end of Year Six. See end notes for warnings clarification.

*~*~*~*

She tried not to watch him. Honestly, she did. But during her sixth year, while Harry's mind was full of Draco Malfoy's alleged nighttime wanderings and supposed dark doings, Hermione was aware only of Professor Snape.

She watched him during DADA, she watched him at meals, she watched him in the evening hours when he stalked the halls like a caged creature. She watched him withdraw deeper into himself, if that was at all possible. She thought of the panic room.

One day in March she knew, without knowing how she knew, that he was preparing to attend another Death Eater function. The lines about his eyes drew taut, his snarl was thin around the edges, his surliness was less focused, rather than more so. Hermione knew, with certainty that thrummed in the pit of her stomach, hard and sinking, that he would be in the panic room that night.

So she waited there for him.

Like before she slipped between shadows through the empty corridors. The wind outside tossed the trees restlessly, sending leaves sailing past the windows, tinged with the lightest green from the Dark Mark floating in the sky like a second moon, far away. As Hermione descended into the dungeons and left the windows and eerie light behind her she felt a strange sense of relief, understanding why Professor Snape preferred his rooms underground. It felt safer here.

The room was just as she'd seen it last, a year earlier. Four walls and naked stone, empty and impassive. She settled herself against the wall opposite the door, with basin of water and clean cloths, blankets and a torch, and she waited. The floor was cold and the castle was utterly silent, and she thought about the studying she wasn't getting done, the sleep she was foregoing. The hours ticked by, and without windows she had no way to gauge the passage of time by stars.

Still she waited, and didn't think about why.

The door swung open on silent hinges, finally, and he seemed strangely unsurprised to see her, if not at all pleased. For her part, Hermione was not frightened of him, but thought a moment later that perhaps she should have been, for this was not the Professor Snape of before. Gone was the weary lethargy, the quiet despair, the anguished resignation. Death followed close behind him this night as it had the last, but this night he looked prepared to fight it tooth and nail and take the Reaper down screaming with him if he had to.

His clothes were disheveled and there was blood, some of it clearly his, and the knees and hem of his robes were sodden with mud that had yet to dry. His eyes flared when he saw her, his chin tilted up slightly, his lip curled.

"Miss Granger," he said, his voice like silk over rusted iron. "Get out."

No ceremony, then. She stood, flexing the feeling back into her chilled calves, dropping the cloth she held into the basin at her feet. "No."

Professor Snape took a few steps into the room, letting the heavy door close behind him. He assessed her with a gaze that was far too calculating and entirely inappropriate, and Hermione told herself that he was doing it to scare her into leaving, not because he truly posed a threat to her.

She knew it wasn't true, but it wasn't in her nature to back down that easily.

"If you stay," he began, and Hermione was briefly startled it had taken so little argument to get this far, "I want you to understand that I will not be responsible for any harm that comes to you, and I will not protect you from myself."

"Yes you will," Hermione replied, her fingers snagging on the fabric of her nightdress as she tucked her hands behind her back.

He blinked and raised an eyebrow, his anger flaring visibly. "This room is my refuge, and you have entered it once again unasked, unwanted. I will take my refuge and my release whether you are here or not. You have been warned." The hand clutching his wand was shaking, with rage rather than exhaustion this time.

"I'm not stopping you," Hermione said, the pit in her stomach thrumming harder, and she leaned back against the wall. "By all means," she said, gesturing at the empty room illuminated by torchlight.

He took another step toward her, then seemed to catch himself and turned his back on her. His fists clenched closed, then open, then closed. He took deep, ragged breaths that heaved his shoulders, and he paced. Hermione's eyes followed him, drinking him like a dark and bitter wine, fascinated. Sparks sputtered intermittently off the end of his wand, little unthinking surges of darkness, aimless and quickly smothered by the room's containment spell.

Hermione had expected something else, something less predatory, something more fragile. She had expected to nurture, to soothe, to bless.

She clearly had much to learn.

"Close your eyes," he gritted as he passed close to her, his face averted, and she could smell the March wind in his black hair. "I don't want you to see me."

The shudder that shook her began in her knees and centered in her stomach, rippling up to rattle her teeth as she closed her eyes too obediently, too unquestioningly.

With her eyes closed her other senses opened up in fear, and she heard his breathing, rough and punctuated by guttural gasps with each crackle of magic from his wand. Her hair stirred gently across her face, cast about in the wake of the impotent magic pounding off the walls.

Curses and Unforgiveables tangled with spells that smelled like light, passing her so closely that she curled her toes under and turned her face to the side, eyes closed tightly, back pressed against the wall. They brushed past like ghosts, like the March wind of his hair, seeming to sniff at her legs like feral cats, leaving her shaking and alive, her heart pounding with proximity.

Her nightdress felt so very thin, and she had left her own wand beside her bed. Until that moment, Hermione had not understood what blind trust truly was, or that she had placed it unthinkingly in his long-fingered, bloodied hands.

After long minutes Hermione's limbs lost some of their rigidity as fear eased slowly into steady waiting, measured out by the beats of her heart. She pictured behind her closed lids the prow of a ship, and herself standing at its forefront, riding out a storm. She wondered if Harry ever felt like this, facing Voldemort.

There was power here, she noticed, in her own stillness, in her anchored feet and her empty hands, in her defiance and her acceptance. She had no idea what to do with it, but she felt it all the same.

When the magic stopped he made a noise in his throat like a wounded bear, and she heard the sharp clatter against the far wall of his wand, thrown hard, and then the dazed roll of it across the stone floor, slowly.

With her head still turned away, she waited.

He came at her quickly, so she had no time to gather fear, and pinned her to the wall with his palm on her breastbone. She felt his fingers in the hollow of her throat, the tackiness of dried blood there. She inhaled slowly and smelled the season, and the iron of blood and muddied earth.

He pressed his prominent nose into her temple, rubbing back and forth against her hairline oddly, not gently, not like a lover, but she responded to it anyway with fluttering pulse and stuttered breath. There was still so much anger there, beneath his skin, so much rage and vitality that it battered her, and she turned her face up into it blindly like she would lean into the wind.

"It's not always against my will," he said, his voice neither light nor cool against her cheek. "I enjoy it. I believed in him once. I could believe in him again, and I could give him the darkest parts of myself, the blood and bone, and all the magic I have, and all the things that keep children like you awake in the night could be my gift to him."

Hermione opened her mouth to speak but for the first time in her life couldn't find any words, and instead tasted him on her inhaled breaths. She felt in one brief and radiant flash all the times she could have but didn't die, at his hands and at the hands of others, and all the ways she still might. Her hands crept forward until her knuckles brushed against the rough wool of his robes, stopping just short of gripping them in supplication or exultation.

The hand on her breastbone was like iron, and his other hand lifted to pass over her hair, over her face, her closed lids. His nose slid down her cheek to rest in the hollow beneath her jaw, and she felt the moist, hot gusts of his words against her throat, and she made a long, slow sound that carried beneath what he said, drawn along in its wake.

"I could destroy something else tonight, and I could enjoy it. I could break you and I could leave you here, and I could wear the memory and your blood like a second skin, and I could return to him and stay there forever. I could kill everyone you love, destroy everything you know and hold dear, and trace it all back to you, and this night."

At that she did wrap her fingers in his robes, and pull him forward by degrees against the gravity of his hand on her chest, until she could feel the rough wool against her blind face, and left her tears there. His heartbeat felt very loud and uneven, trembling the breast of his robes beneath her face. This close she smelled arnica and yarrow, saturated into the wool from hours of brewing potions.

"You won't, though," she said, and her voice was not her own, muffled by wool.

"I won't," he agreed in a whisper, his hand finally leaving her chest with a sticky snagging sensation, and slowly his fingers closed over her shoulders, and she was still pinned against the wall but it wasn't against her will.

Hours or minutes passed in the windowless room, while Hermione leaned against the wall and bore the weight of Snape's body and decisions, while he breathed into her hair and shook and she listened to the arrhythmic beating of his heart beneath her ear. She thought of how surreal it felt, and wondered if tomorrow in class he'd look at her differently, or if like last time this would become an encounter seemingly remembered only by one.

She felt him pull away and held perfectly still as his hands slipped down her arms and lingered at the fullness of her waist, thumbs resting in the hollows of her hipbones. She could not have guessed at his intentions, but was suddenly aware of wanting things she'd never wanted before, or at least not in such an unlikely context or with such an unlikely man, and she knew herself to be a sly creature capable of self-deception. She had worn this thin wisp of a nightdress for him.

Her cheeks flushed hot and she heard him say softly, "You can open your eyes now, Miss Granger." The torchlight threw wild shadows and she blinked like a newborn. He was kneeling in front of her, and as she watched he released her waist, leaving red trails and coldness where his fingers had heated the fabric, and held his hands up toward her.

His palms were stained with blood, his fingers smeared with it, rust colored evidence of sins committed and enjoyed. His dark eyes glittered like obsidian, unfathomable yet strangely open to her.

Without any semblance of grace she let her knees buckle and her legs fold, and landed hard before him, her fingers reaching and finding the cloth in the basin of water nearby. She washed the blood from his hands and it felt like a ritual, and she wondered if he let her do it because she was something clean in his hopelessly soiled life, and if she sought him out because he was something filthy amidst so much sheltered innocence in hers.

When he was clean, and she had bound the scratches on his forearms that looked as though they had been made by fingernails, he took her face in his hands. His hands had done unspeakable things, and they would do them again, she had no doubt, but they also cradled her face like something fine and fragile, like no one had ever touched her before.

"Little girl," he said softly, and his eyes were earnest and grave, "do you have any idea what's going to happen by the time this war is over?"

Hermione swallowed thickly. "I know what war is."

He made a sound like a laugh, but his gaze was sad. "No, you don't. But you will, and I think I would spare you that if I could. You can still get out. You have a better chance than most of us, being Muggle-born. You could go back to that life you had before. You could put your wand away. You could live."

"You think I'm going to die?"

"You'll be targeted, surely you knew that. Twice over, because of your connection to Potter as well."

Hermione pursed her lips, hyper-aware of his thumbs on the fine, thin skin beside her eyes. "I think you're more likely to die than I am."

Severus Snape smiled. It was the closest thing she'd ever seen to a true smile, and was both beautiful and terrible at once. "I plan on it."

So she kissed him, just leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, tasting the copper scent of blood that permeated him, feeling the harsh contours of his mouth relax under hers in surprise.

He barely moved, but barely was enough for her and she slipped her tongue between his lips, crossing the line between mistake and undeniable intent. His flavor was like a cauldron, black and steaming, full of the most incongruous ingredients for the most volatile potion imaginable, and Hermione could imagine a lot.

She caught his bottom lip between her teeth, gently testing its supple resistance, wondering how hard she could bite down before she broke the skin. She was beginning to find out when his hands shifted suddenly, using the ropes of her hair to draw her back away from him. He held her there for a long minute, her mouth a fraction of an inch from his, her neck bowed back under the strain on her scalp, but it didn't hurt. No, it wasn't pain she felt at all.

Remembering she could use her eyes, she opened them and looked, and saw that he hadn't stopped her because he didn't want her. He'd stopped her because he did.

She licked her lips and he shook her, his hands winding deeper into the tangle of her hair."You stupid, stupid girl," he gritted out between clenched teeth. "You haven't heard a single word I've said, have you? Not one word."

Hermione heard the thread of despair inside the anger in his voice and she gasped out a laugh as he pushed her away to fall back against the wall. She closed her eyes and rested her head back, her scalp tingling where his fingers had gripped her hair. "I think I heard too much, Professor," she whispered back, but she couldn't be sure he'd heard her. When she opened her eyes he was gone, and the sound of his staggering footsteps echoed quietly away down the hall.

When she left the panic room this time she knew she would not wait for him there again, but she wondered, touching her bruised lips with trembling fingers, if he would still look for her there.

A few weeks later Dumbledore was dead, Snape was in the wind, and Hermione wondered no more.

~end~

**Author's Note:**

> Themes include allusions to violence and underage UST with an adult, but nothing more explicit than kissing.


End file.
